Money to Burn (12 page)

Dorda put his arm out of the Studebaker window and gave Cancela the
coup de grâce
in his stomach. Dorda laughed out loud.

'Die, pig,' he said and took aim at the other policeman while the Crow revved up the car and set it in motion.

But the black was brave and leapt forward firing with his .45 and the twins crouched down in the car because he'd succeeded in wounding the Uruguayan they were bringing with them.

The black paused in the middle of the street and continued firing while Mereles accelerated the car and set off around the corner with a squeal of tyres. During the exchange the black completely emptied his gun and had to take a moment's refuge on the threshold of the chemist's shop to reload. Following this (Lucia Passero continued) he went on firing until the car and its criminal occupants disappeared. It was like seeing a film projected for her alone, an unforgettable experience, those men crouched down and shooting, their faces frozen, their eyes steady, the dunglike smell of the gunpowder, the near-chestnut colour of the blood, the squeal of the tyres on the escaping car and the focused expression on the face of the black grasping his pistol in his two hands, holding steady, his legs spread wide on the paving stones. 'I saw,' said the woman, 'that one of the evil-doers had been wounded,' and it was true, she saw exactly how a bullet smashed the car's rear window as it passed by the bakery and saw also how one of those men shook his head and kept touching his waist, each time staring at the blood on his hand as he lifted it.

'They got me,' the Uruguayan said and lowered his head to look at his blood-soaked hands as he pressed them against his abdomen. He was calm and frantic at one and the same time, so surprised at what had happened to him, he didn't know how to react. He was called Yamandú Raymond Acevedo and had never been wounded before. He'd agreed to work with the Argentines on the car job because they were paying him a load of money and had promised him more to take them to the Brazilian frontier, to Rio Grande do Sul, up north past Santa Ana.

'We can't keep going with you,' Kid Brignone was calmly saying to his face. 'Sorry, brother, but you'll have to get out.'

'You're sending me to my death, Kid, don't leave me here in this state, I beg you, for God's sake.'

Yamandú looked at him, whey-faced, begging first the Kid and then Dorda, who had the Beretta resting across his knees.

'You're fucked, Yamandú,' said the Gaucho, 'you'll have to sort yourself out alone, we have to keep on going, nothing's going to happen to you.'

'Don't be a bastard, Argie, don't just hand me over, let's go to Malito's and let him decide what to do.'

Dorda lifted his Beretta and pointed it at his temple. 'Be grateful that I'm not polishing you off. If you get caught and sing, be sure I'll find you and cut off your balls.'

'You're a pile of shit, you lot, you can't treat people like this,' replied the Uruguayan.

The Crow barely slowed down and Yamandú opened the car door. He was going to have to chuck himself out in order to avoid being killed. He threw himself as far as possible from the car and fell sideways on to the tarmac.

The car accelerated again and Dorda stuck the gun out of the window and fired at him, without managing to score a direct hit. To Yamandú this was proof that the Argentines were a lost cause, because there was an unwritten law in operation, a code of honour that you had to respect. Nobody abandons a wounded comrade who has behaved with absolute loyalty as if he were a nark. 'They were mad killers,' said Yamandú, 'living in complete delirium, they wanted to reach New York by car along the PanAmerican Highway, raiding banks along the way and robbing pharmacies for drug supplies. They were obsessed with this, they studied maps of all the side roads, and calculated how long it would take to get to North America. They were off their heads, hallucinating that they'd be working for the Puerto Rican mafia in New York, getting into the 'hood, into the Latin ghetto and starting over there, where nobody knew them. They couldn't even get out of Montevideo city centre, and they wanted to get to New York because the Kid had heard the tango singer who set up the robbery for them saying he'd met a Cuban with a restaurant in New York and they wanted to go and get into business with him, crazy stuff like that. I have never,' added Yamandú, 'come across guys like these.' No doubt Yamandú exaggerated, in order to shift the immense pressure he felt he was under and make himself out to be a simple bumpkin, no more than a stool-pigeon of the Argentines, who forced him to get involved in things he would never otherwise have gone near.

'He'll squeal,' said the Gaucho, enraged at not having succeeded in finishing him off. 'He'll bring the lot of us down with
him
...
He knows all the houses, hiding places, where the hell are we going to go now?'

'Calm down and let me think,' replied the Kid.

'Think, what can you think about? That animal will squeal, fucking creep that he is, we have to go back and waste him.'

'He's right,' said the Crow and reversed and then swung round at full speed, the car returning to the avenue where they'd dumped the Uruguayan. But when they got there, Yamandú had succeeded in dragging himself across a plot of wasteland and was hiding there, in a shed on the yard at the back of the hairdresser's, waiting for nightfall and the chance to make his getaway. He also persuaded himself, hidden there in a kind of covered gallery where the dryers were stored, looking like scuba-diving helmets with metal feet, the revolving armchairs with their white leather armrests, the basins with their round bowls pushing forward and all the tubes and sprays for hair-washing behind, with mirrors and boxes of combs and curlers, that he could just about hear the engine of the car that had returned and was searching the streets for him and it also seemed to him he could hear (or imagined he could hear) the Gaucho's voice calling him as if he were a kitten: 'Pussy, pussy, pussy.' 'He was entirely capable of doing that' (according to Yamandú) 'for he was a total speedfreak, completely off his head, who did whatever the Kid ordered him to, and the Kid was colder than a snake, he didn't care nothing for no one.'

They took several turns around the area and even passed the plot of wasteland and the shed where Yamandú was hidden, but they didn't manage to find him and so left the centre when they heard the sound of approaching police patrol sirens. Without a doubt the police now had the details on the car, and as soon as he fell into their hands the Uruguayan would provide them with all the information necessary to identify them. As ever, Malito was off by himself, on his own in a pad over on Pocitos unknown to anyone, setting up a connection to get him back into Buenos Aires should the crossing into Brazil go awry. They had an appointment to meet him the following day. But by then he would already be aware of what had been happening.

'We need to get clear altogether,' said the Crow. 'Fall back and regroup.'

'Let's go, then,' said the Kid. 'Let's try and get there ahead of the cops.'

They were absolutely certain that Yamandú was about to fall into their hands and that, of course, he'd see them stuffed. They stopped off at the safehouse where they'd been holed up since coming to Montevideo, and grabbed their arms and the money five minutes before the police got there. From then onwards, they broke all contact with the network Nando had set up for them in Uruguay, and began looking for somewhere to hide. They were completely cut off, everyone shunned them as if they were lepers.

'I know where to go,' Kid Brignone said after a while.

'D'you have a pad?' asked the Crow.

They had paused in a side street off the main drag of the Rambla, facing the river. They had hidden the car under some trees in the Parque Rodo, and were tipping back beer from the bottle sitting on the running-board, with the car doors open, and the guns and cash stashed in the hole left by their removal of the rear passenger seats.

'Wait here, you lot.'

The Kid crossed the road, entered a café, and looked for a pay phone at the back of the bar.

By this time Yamandú had been discovered in the middle of a ladies' hairdresser. The police out patrolling the district found him crouched at the back of the shop. In spite of the wound in his abdomen, the gunman attempted to escape but was brought down. He begged for mercy on his knees and finally implicated all his associates, letting them know how he got connected.

'Don't kill me,' he pleaded, 'it was all the Argies' fault.'

Their subject before them was one Yamandú Raymond Acevedo, of Uruguayan nationality, and with a long police record. He was taken to the Military Hospital, where he received first aid. The doctors did their utmost to keep him awake and alert.

Raymond, under police interrogation, admitted to having been party to the gunfight in which police officer Cancela met his death, further admitting that he had continued on in the company of the Argentine criminals until they, in view of the fact that he - Yamandú - could no longer continue the flight because of his wound, attempted to kill him. His lengthy statement to the police allowed them to make a step-by-step reconstruction of their movements from the time they reached Montevideo. At the same time, the police immediately set in motion a series of raids to intercept the gang's progress.

Having gathered sufficient physical details and particular characteristics of the four, they made contact with the police force across the River (again, according to the press). Then a series of photographic portraits of the gunmen confirmed their Argentine nationality. Of the four men in the group, Yamandú recognized three of the Argentine assailants from the rogues' gallery. They were Mereles, Brignone and Dorda. However, he knew nothing of where one Enrique Mario Malito was holed up.

The criminal world found itself in a 'state of alert', for the investigations clearly demonstrated that the assassins, along with local swindlers and smugglers, had collaborated in concealing the Argentine gunmen, and were now in fear of police reprisals. The latest version to circulate was that Malito's gang had set off for Colonia in a desperate attempt to return across the River Plate into Buenos Aires. Today (or perhaps yesterday) the smuggler known as Omar Blasi Lentini had been detained, along with his pregnant wife and his two small children, for having procured shelter for the gang in the home of customs officer Pedro Glasser at number 2108 San Salvador Avenue. At once, the police were on the tracks of the Argentine criminal Hernando Heguilein, 'Nando', former member of the National Liberation Alliance (ALN) during Perón's reign, and accused by Lentini of being the lynchpin of every high-flying criminal who reached Uruguay from another country, and who had served as a link between the fugitives and the Uruguayan criminal world.

On Friday, 5 November, a police task force, having succeeded in detaining Lentini - on grounds of acting for the 'El Cacho'
{13}
gang of juvenile delinquents - finally picked up Heguilein's trail.

This individual was concealed in a house on Cufré Street, where the police took him by surprise in his pyjamas while he was shaving one morning. Despite being surrounded, he fled over the roofs and leapt from the flat roof of an adjacent house into the garden below, where he was finally captured. Nando said he'd left the gang when he became 'horrified at the cowardly way in which they had attempted to bump off Yamandú. I am a man of principles, a political prisoner. I belong to the National Justice Movement (MNJ)
{14}
and fight for the return of General Perón,' declared the criminal.

'Yes, yes, of course you do,' replied Police Commissioner Santana Cabris of the Investigations Bureau. 'But primarily you are a vicious Argie bastard who murders my police officers.'

Nando knew about torture, he knew he had to remain silent for as long as he possibly could. Because with the cattle prod, if you begin talking, you find you just can't stop. He was going to try to say nothing at all, not a single word, because he was afraid of having the location of Malito's safehouse forced out of him. Malito counted as his friend, not just any old fellow, he was a true old-style bandit and an idealist, this Malito, who could yet become a popular hero after the fashion of Di Giovanni or Scarfó, or even like that Ruggerito or the forger Alberto Lezin and the rest of the wild bunch who'd fought for the nationalist side.
{15}
They were going to have to kill him, thought Nando, 'cause he wasn't going to give away Malito's hiding-place.

He tried not to think while they were taking him down to the torture chamber. Nando had decided to keep his mind a blank, white as a new sheet or an unwritten page. They had bound his eyes, and were possibly intending to bring him before the judge within twenty-four hours. He had seen them in uglier moods on other occasions, and this time was certain the press were behind the police and that they would publicize the fact of his being taken prisoner.

The truth was that Heguilein's capture went almost unnoticed in the tight contract between the journalists and police back at Headquarters, when it transpired that they had found the missing face among the Argentine gunmen. It was from this time on (according to the reporter on
El Mundo
) that the greatest barbecue that had ever been 'roasted' in the police annals of the River Plate division started heating up.

A few hours into the afternoon, in a Buenos Aires province police aeroplane, tourist class, the chief of the Buenos Aires police from Zona Norte, Police Commissioner Cayetano Silva, arrived at Carrasco airport to cooperate with the Uruguayan authorities.

As they taxied down the airport runway, and before descending from the aeroplane, Silva was sifting the information from his colleagues.

'We came across them quite by accident, in a ridiculous incident. They were switching the licence plates on a stolen car.'

'They're on their own. They've no further contacts.'

'Time to put on the pressure.'

'It's not necessary to go around arresting everyone. You need to leave some elements at large and wait until the Argies try and contact them.'